Picture-Perfect Endings

There was no drama.  No big finish.  Romeo and Juliet didn't jump up,
spout sonnets, kiss like there's no tomorrow, then swoon
into the sunset; they removed the dagger from her, washed their faces, straightened their clothes, moved to the suburbs, and had 2.5
pleasant but un-Shakespearean children.

The lion didn't lie down with the lamb. There was too much history
between them.  All of that clawing, growling, grimacing and flying
of wool.  Their guard was still up.  Who wants to be caught lying
down?  But, the past was past, why hold grudges, and, in their youth,
they'd loved to dance. They formed a rock band.

You didn't see me waving outside the tunnel, waiting to stroke your
hair again; and your mom never said I'm sorry I ran away from you
and your Dad with a man who hummed along when Sinatra sang
 "The Lady is a Tramp."


On Emily Dickinson's Birthday

At age eight, I wanted to be either a monk
or a poet, murmurs the cigarette-embedded
woman at the airport bar.  Now, the Dow
is her muse.  Spreadsheets, her ars poetica.

Yet, memories persist: her last trip
to Amherst...her mother wishing
for a magic feather just before
she died...in the cemetery, her father
reading Emily's Collected Poems, as if this
would keep him from jumping into the grave.

By sleight of hand, in the summer
of her tortured monetary dreams, Shakespearean
sonnets encode her Blackberry.  Haiku
hibernate in her hard drive.  She knows
hope is the thing with pretzels and Prozac.


I Didn't Know Ted Baxter Would Save My Life                                                               - -after William Shakespeare

Disgraced with fortune and the doctor's eyes,
scratchy blankets muffling my rapier cries,
Team Trauma and Team Dislocation
playing football with my fate,
I, turn, alone, weeping in my outcast state,
not to the Bard of Stratford-on-Avon,
but to Ted Baxter, the W.S. of WJM,
the TV station that dreams are made of.
Hamlet's spicy, but, the wrong condiment,
ghosts and goblins disturb my morphine haze.
Watching Ted say it's neither fish nor nuts,
to Lou about his dayglo clothes, hound
Mary for a date, confuse veterinarians
into vegetarians on the news – pain
is the girl next door in the sitcom of my life.